


and many more to come

by kiafeles



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-30
Updated: 2018-03-30
Packaged: 2019-04-14 10:35:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14134305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiafeles/pseuds/kiafeles
Summary: There isn't much Zack can do to celebrate Cloud's special day while they're on the run, but he does his best.





	and many more to come

**Author's Note:**

> This is the result of my many sad musings and headcanons. If I make mistakes regarding compilation canon just lemme know, I decided to do this on a whim and I'm not great with continuity.

The wind has morphed into a soft breeze by the time Zack settles them down for the night. He finds the semblance of shelter in the form of a small cave, hidden deep in the ground on a grassy hillside, far enough from the nearest village not to be easily noticed, but close enough to make a hasty escape, if nothing else.

The wind sings a soft tune as it bounces off the cave walls, but it doesn’t bother Zack. If anything, it emphasizes their current isolation, that temporary inkling of security that Zack has forcibly created for them. He’s managed to shake off Shinra’s goons for the time being, and expects their disappearance will be sustained for another week or two before Shinra catches their scent once more, but he doesn’t dwell on it today.

Cloud lets out a small noise that barely distinguishes itself above the wind, and Zack is immediately crouching beside the boy, who leans against the cave wall in his stupor.

“What is it?” Zack says, but instead of responding ( _ he hasn’t spoken for...how long has it been? A year? Two? _ ), Cloud whimpers and his eyes roll back. The blond’s voice gives way to desperate panting a moment later, and Zack starts.

“Oh,” Zack says, before gently pulling Cloud out of his shirt. It’s mid-August after all, and even with a rare, airy breeze alleviating some of the heat, the temperatures have been staggering. Zack wrinkles his nose as the stench of dirt and sweat wafts up from his companion, but there’s no helping it. Not much you can do to stay hygenic on the run, after all, having only the clothes on their backs and scattered river baths to rely on.

Cloud calms down as he’s gently stripped, and the cave wall, cool in its twenty-four hour shadow, presses into his bare back. Zack sits back and surveys his work, wiping the sweat from his own brow in partial relief as the younger boy slowly cools. Cloud taken care of, Zack uses the time to organize his duffle bag.

All their meager belongings rest in that bag. Some non-perishables and water, his materia and a few extra daggers, some basic survival gear and a few gil he’s stolen from shops or pickpocketed off people in the scattered towns and villages, and not much else.

Not much else but the special something he managed to scrounge up earlier that morning, when they’d stopped by a bakery in town.

There is always that risk, of course, when they daringly approach large groups of people in the communities that dot the Planet. That constant fear hovers over them, the knowledge that the next person they encounter might be the enemy, a Shinra soldier or Turk in disguise ready to pounce on two starving boys with nowhere to run. Running as much as he has, however, Zack knows when he’s willing to push away the caution and paranoia. He knows then it’s worth it to push s boundaries.

“So Cloud…” he starts, digging the small, plastic container out of his bag. “I got us a little something. Well. I got _you_  something.”

At this point in time Zack and Cloud look as dirty as they are dirt poor, with the very obvious features of refugees on the run. But the baker in town had taken one look at the pitiful, bright-eyed boys, one bedraggled and sleep deprived, the other all but dead to the world, and had given Zack the cake and a bonus loaf of bread free of charge.

It’s the little things, from people he doesn’t know and can be almost guaranteed never to see again, that remind Zack why he still trusts in a world that long ago turned its back on him.

“I dunno if you like vanilla...but it’s pretty if nothing else. It fits you, don’t you think?”

_ Ha ha. _

The cake is partially crushed from its rough treatment inside Zack’s bag, but he can still make out the little chocobo caricatures, small yellow dollops of frosting that run on a green field of icing. The cake is small and can easily be shared between the two of them, but Zack’s more concerned for the symbolism than the taste.

“Oh, don’t be like that,” he says, setting the cake on the cave floor between them. Cloud’s eyes are as impassive as ever. “What do you mean it’s unoriginal? So what, it’s true.” He huffs in faux annoyance, reaching forward to ruffle Cloud’s bright yellow hair. Chocoboy, he calls him, hoping the insult will call forth some sort of indignation.

“I’m sorry I don’t have any candles. I found the materia to light them, but I guess it just slipped my mind,” he says while cutting Cloud a piece, placing the slice on a crumpled brown napkin and holding it up to his friend.

Cloud blinks slowly at him. No recognition sparks into life in those features, and the bright blue eyes, swirling with fluorescent green, do naught but burn back in Zack’s general direction.

Zack sets the cake back down and sighs, staring out through the cave entrance. The breeze has finally settled into a steady and unobtrusive pace, and the cave no longer sings. He can see strands of grass waving at edge of the mouth, wisping around like tendrils of solidified Lifestream.

As much as they ebb and flow, they’re tethered to the Planet just as he is.

“If you prefer chocolate,” Zack starts, voice doggedly refusing to break, “I get it. But it’s your birthday and it’s all we got. You can take one bite. For me?”

His grin is outlined by chapped lips, and he reaches forward with a free hand to cup the blond’s cheek. Cloud’s cheekbone juts out, and Zack runs a hand through the boy’s dry hair. He’s always been on the skinny side in Zack’s eyes, but with every day, he finds it harder and harder to stare at the younger boy’s frame. Making sure Cloud eats enough ranges from a patient exercise in force feeding to an outright battle, when Cloud feels threatened with those invisible demons they both see, but which only Zack can really shake.

“My mom used to make the best cookies for my birthday,” he says abruptly, falling back into one of his old tales. They fill the empty space between them with something concrete. As unreliable as memories are, they’re all they have anymore to bridge the silence.

Zack wonders what his mother is up to now. Forever guilty at his lack of consistent correspondence while in SOLDIER, he nonetheless carries on.

“She’d get this marmalade from the neighbor—she made it fresh, from the oranges in her backyard—and Mom would bake them into these small butter cookies, and they tasted divine, let me tell you. I should have gotten the recipe from her last time I visited. You can’t make them like that in Midgar, that’s for sure, but it would’ve been a treat.”

He nods to Cloud, his smile lost in memory, and the boy’s head dips.

“Did your Mom ever have a favorite recipe?”

_ You’ve had her food. You should remember, Zack. _

Zack recalls the night Cloud had invited him over to eat with his mother. That had been the one and only time Zack met the woman, but her kindness is memorable, all these years later.

It may not be a good idea to bring her up here, lest he set Cloud off, but Zack’s running on empty when it comes to stories anymore. He’s taken to sprinkling in fabricated tales about his past at this point, each one increasingly outlandish in his attempts to jog Cloud’s memory with _something_.

Perhaps if Zack can trigger something pleasant, then the mako running through Cloud’s system will grant Cloud the privilege of waking up to retell a happy memory of his own. 

But like all other days, the poison does not abate, so Zack is left to fill the silence with his own thoughts and memories.

In those scant moments they’d been left alone together in the lab below Shinra Manor, long enough to cling to each other desperately before the scientists pulled them clawing apart from each other, before they’d been forcibly returned to another round in those horrid green tubes, Zack and Cloud had spoken to each other in low and fevered voices.

He recalls messages passed between them achingly slow, scraped on glass with bloody fingernails, desperation the only thing that had driven them.

Those opportunities had faded as the months rolled by, and with them, Cloud’s consciousness. Zack can still recall the last words Cloud spoke to him, mixing the notes of a frantic plea with the burning hope Zack has come to expect of the boy. With a tired determination hidden behind blazing blue eyes, Cloud had tapped a frantic rhythm on Zack’s wrist, indicating through code the next of their many escape plans. 

Like the ones before, their coded messages and escape attempts had failed, and Zack both hates that Cloud’s last conscious moments with him were so fruitlessly hopeful.

Zack rests trembling hands into his lap and allows himself the moment of weakness, the chance to crack. He curbs it with a few deep breaths, and returns his attention to the present. There’s no point in staying rooted in the past, when all he wants is to move forward, and all he needs to survive is to stay on edge, but never over it.

The lack of proper sleep is just catching up to him, he decides. Narrowing his eyes suspiciously at the cave entrance, he tries to funnel the paranoia into fueling him, rather than pushing him closer to the precipice.

Zack begins to eat his own slice of the cake in silence and once finished, tries wiping yellow frosting on Cloud’s lips, willing him to swallow. When that doesn’t work so well, simply staining Cloud’s lips and Zack’s fingers a sickly yellow, he retrieves his stock of runny, soft foods, and finds a bit more success in getting Cloud to ingest that.

What Zack has been feeding him the past few months is not nearly enough for Cloud to maintain his weight, but he’s hoping it will last them at least until they can reach Aerith in Midgar, who’ll be more than willing to take them in and heal them.

She may be cross at Zack, once they return. From her perspective, Zack had fallen off the face of the earth without looking back. She’s nice enough to forgive his transgressions, especially once he tells her the circumstances as to his sudden flubbing of their relationship (circumstances she’s smart enough to conclude herself, in some cases), but she’s not one to easily forget, and he winces thinking of the upcoming confrontation, even as he longs for it.

Cloud makes a small keening noise, and Zack laughs at the interruption to his thoughts.

“I know, I know, and I’m sorry. The cake was all I could get without making a scene.” Reaching forward again, he tugs at Cloud’s uniform to adjust it, before placing his hand on either side of the boy’s face. With a gentleness he learned from his mother doing the same to him as a child, he pulls Cloud’s face up and rests his cheek on the other boy’s forehead, hoping to detect if he’s caught a fever.

_ You’re smothering me, Zack. _

“I know, I know…” Zack murmurs distantly, before he slowly pulls back. Cloud doesn’t have a fever, but that just means nothing has changed, for better or for worse.

“I promise I’ll make it up to you, Cloud. I’ll get you something when we reach Midgar—ooh, maybe a motorcycle, you always mentioned wanting one of those, and I’m sure we can scrounge up the cash for something simple by your next birthday at least…” he trails off thinking as his gaze roams over his collection of smaller knives. With a start, his gaze snaps back to Cloud’s face and to the brittle, blond strands that frame it.

“Actually...I think I thought of something you’d like.”

Grabbing the sharpest knife he has, Zack begins the slow and careful process of cutting Cloud’s messy mane. Spikes of overgrown hair fall around his face in dirty clumps, and Zack alternates between running fingers through it to disentangle it and chopping the longer segments off. Zack’s tongue sticks out as he concentrates, trying to sculpt the boy’s hair into some semblance of the old chocobo butt of a hairdo it was before.

Cursing as his mind brings up hitherto murky memories, Zack speaks up again.

“I didn’t even sing to you. What’s wrong with me today?” 

Zack pauses in his ministrations to place a hand on his head and shake it sadly, and then begins to sing. He doesn’t realize until he’s focused again on cutting a particularly knotted strand that he isn’t singing a birthday song, but rather an old Gongagan melody his father taught him, back when Zack would trail behind the older man as a child. The words are sometimes wrong or replaced with humming in the parts he can’t fully recall, and Zack’s singing voice has never been something to fawn over, but he tries to portray it the best he can, suspecting that Cloud doesn’t mind the inaccuracies. 

“There.”

Cloud’s bangs may be a bit uneven when he finishes, but the boy looks miles closer to his old self, and Zack sits back on his haunches to evaluate his work.

“Not bad if I do say so myself.”

There’s no smile or reaction from Cloud, so Zack shrugs. Today was supposed to be a happy day, so help him, and if that means pretending Cloud likes his shitty haircut, then by Shiva, Zack’ll fake it, even if it takes the last vestiges of his limited freedom to achieve it.

Zack finally carries on with their regular nightly routine after that. With practiced motions, he cleans up the last bits of their meal, briefly brings himself and Cloud outside to relieve themselves, and then wipes Cloud’s face and hands clean.

A jolt of realization runs through him as he’s haphazardly sweeping a spot on the cave floor for them to sleep.

“How old are you now, anyway? Uh…” he rubs the back of his neck, abashed. “I think I lost count of myself too, to be honest. Eh, it doesn’t really matter anyway, does it? We’re practically two old men at this point, aren’t we?”

_ You’re the only old man here,  _ he imagines Cloud saying.  _ Crazy, too. _

The real Cloud, the one not trapped inside Zack’s head, doesn’t laugh at the joke either, and Zack chalks it up to him losing his touch. Any other reason would dig that dark hole deeper and deeper inside of him.

They settle down for sleep quickly after that. Sleeping Cloud isn’t much different than awake Cloud, after all. The only real difference is that when they sleep, Zack holds Cloud tight in his arms, cocooning the smaller boy in an embrace aimed to provide as much protection and warmth as possible amid their limitations.

Zack didn’t used to be a light sleeper, but he’s developed the habit out of necessity. He’s grown prone to waking up at every sudden noise, ready to make a quick escape if the source of the disturbance is decidedly deadly or Shinra-shaped.

When it isn’t the rumblings of the night that keep him awake, the memories and the lurid nightmares keep him up. Occasionally he hears Cloud’s voice in these dreams, but the words are often jumbled or colored by fading screams.

Sometimes, a woman’s laughter permeates his thoughts, and sometimes it is a man’s. When he’s stricken with these dreams, he wakes up to choked breaths and burning eyes. Sometime Hojo appears before him, sometimes Sephiroth or that twisted being he has come to represent, all of them with subtle smiles twisted into something dark and cruel. 

Other times, it isn’t images but the physical sting of mako that keeps him up. Zack was exposed to mako heavily before—it was an occupational hazard of sorts in SOLDIER—but the level Hojo exposed him to the past few years surpases even that, leading to nights of moaning and aches, when his body is exceptionally sleep-deprived and weak. Zack has built up a tolerance, sure, but even he has his limits. He may not be near comatose like Cloud, but it still hurts like a bitch on cold nights.

He’s graced with a few moments of respite tonight, going to sleep with the relief that he’ll finally get a break, but the soft sound of crying wakes him up a before he makes any real progress with his rest.

Anger is Zack’s first emotion upon waking, and he staggers up, ready to attack whatever has spooked Cloud.  

Zack doesn’t know when he first noticed it—the anger—except that one day it had suddenly been there, pressing into the back of his mind. The disdain and the bitterness, creeping up slowly and steadily upon him, rotting his false idealizations of honor to the core. 

Springing up from the cave floor, Zack quiets his breathing and scans the mouth of the cave with gritted teeth. Upon discovering nothing but a few caves bugs crawling up the wall, Zack realizes that Cloud’s problems are entirely internal.

_ It hurts, Zack. _

The anger smolders and rolls into a fury, but Zack lets none of it bleed into his expression. Instead he relaxes back into Cloud’s side and brings him closer to his chest, murmuring words of comfort.

“We’re okay, Cloud. We’re safe. We’re alive. We’re going to Midgar. You remember Midgar?”

The sentences repeat and repeat until they end up as nothing but nonsensical cooing, but Zack’s tone calms the other boy down nonetheless, and Cloud grows quiet soon enough.

“I’m sorry this is all I can do,” he finishes, head resting once more on the cold stone floor.

_ You do your best. _

The laugh that burst out from him is a little manic, and he has to clench his mouth around his fist to avoid waking his friend again, to keep the stinging in his eyes at bay, but he pushes it back like he always does. 

“My best isn’t enough.” 

In moments like these, Zack misses the vast network of support he never really appreciated when he was younger. Hi misses his parents and Aerith. He misses Angeal, Kunsel, and Cissnei. Hell, he even misses Genesis and Sephiroth, because for all the suffering they’ve caused him, they had once been the symbols of normalcy in a life he took for granted.

Zack misses Cloud most of all, because he represents that which is the closest to him but simultaneously so far. He tries to dismiss that train of thought immediately, however, because it tastes like giving up, and Zack never been fond of giving up, despite it all.

Regardless, it makes Zack wonder. Is he wasting his life, here? Did it go to waste as soon as he set foot in Nibelheim, that ill-fated day so long ago, or was his fate sealed even earlier? Did it go to waste that day he first met Cloud, or when he became a First Class Soldier? When he joined Shinra? Earlier than that?

“I’m a bit of a failure, aren’t I?” he says to Cloud. 

_ Never. _

Pulling Cloud closer to him, he lets himself smile, a small sad excuse of an expression, but a genuine one nonetheless.

He supposes that if he can only be a hero for one person, he’s glad that it’s for Cloud.

Shuffling on the stone floor, preparing for round two of Operation Try To Get Sleep, Zack musters a soft breath.

"Happy birthday, Cloud. Next year’ll be better, I promise."

**Author's Note:**

> Edit 02/2019: no part 2 I'm afraid, apologies! it's been a year and I don't think I can add more. Hope this one part will suffice (it's pretty self-contained anyway).
> 
> Please feel free to yell at me on twitter [@kiafeles](https://twitter.com/kiafeles)


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